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Sep 1, 2018

Meet the team giving the 'OK Google' bot its personality

Ryan Germick leads the team trying to give Google's artificial
intelligence-powered virtual assistant a personality that he describes
as like a "cool librarian."
The goal is to make Assistant fun and playful, without pretending to be human.

Google Assistant, the digital bot powering Google's Home smart speakers
and available as an app for Android and iOS phones, is supposed to feel
like a "cool librarian."

That's according to Ryan Germick, who leads the team responsible for shaping the product's personality.

In the past few years, all the major tech companies have released their
own version of an AI assistant, and experts predict the smart speaker
market will continue to grow. Adoption is particularly important for
Google, which needs to defend its retail ad sales turf against Amazon
(though very few people are actually using smart speakers to shop, yet).

Given the array of options on the market, Germick and his team of
filmmakers, comedians, and "empathy experts" want to make sure that its
Assistant stands out by being playful, not just capable.

It will never be exactly hip, but it will goof around if users prod it.

"If we're doing our jobs properly, there should hopefully be some sort
of emotional attachment to the Assistant — you should be sad if it falls
into the sink and goes haywire!" he says. "I think we're just
scratching the surface in terms of creating a character that you really
want to spend time with that you feel provides value in your life."

Alhough the product has a personality, it's not meant to seem like a
real person. There is no backstory to the character —it's not, for
example, a 27-year-old from Colorado who's into kite-surfing, Germick
quips — nor will give a straight answer if you ask its favorite food.

"One of our principles is that we speak like a human, but we never pretend to be one," he says.

Even if Assistant did try to seem human, the technology is still very
limited in how well it could actually mimic a real conversation.
(Although Google did stir up an ethical debate earlier this year when
one of its other products, called Duplex, imitated a human's verbal tics
on automated phone calls.).

"[Voice assistants] are so new that we're constantly trying to find
where the right line is," Germick adds. "That's one of the reasons it's
so exciting to be in this space."

While the personality team crafts a wide-range of answers — preparing
Assistant to respond to requests like "Will you marry me?" alongside
topical queries like "Who's going to win the Super Bowl?" — they're only
writing a tiny fraction of the answers that the Assistant spits out. It
pulls most of its answers from the web or from personalized sources,
like to-do lists, schedules or Spotify mixes.

Germick says that one of his favorite things about working on the
Assistant is how it makes technology more intuitively accessible for
people. Spoken commands don't require users to dig through phone menus
or learn a new interface, for example, which can be particularly useful
for seniors or people with disabilities.